


Sea of Love

by shevines



Category: The Voice RPF
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-05
Updated: 2014-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 15:17:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1271233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shevines/pseuds/shevines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Twelve hours on set and he can feel his soul leaking out his body.</p><p>Twelve hours. Is that a normal amount of time? Twelve. Twelve more will make an entire day around the sun. He has been here since early morning and tomorrow he will lie and greet the morning as if it is something to be grateful for. Fifteen minute break every two hours, recuperate, recuperate, x number of singers for every x number of minutes. Pills for the headache. They don’t work for shit.</p><p>He can’t handle this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sea of Love

**Author's Note:**

> This was (very) loosely based off of The National's "Sea of Love" (hence the title) so I guess listening to it wouldn't be a bad idea. I'm sorry this is so sad!

Twelve hours on set and he can feel his soul leaking out his body.

Twelve hours. Is that a normal amount of time? Twelve. Twelve more will make an entire day around the sun. He has been here since early morning and tomorrow he will lie and greet the morning as if it is something to be grateful for. Fifteen minute break every two hours, recuperate, recuperate, x number of singers for every x number of minutes. Pills for the headache. They don’t work for shit.

He can’t handle this.

It’s getting worse.

There’s a buzz among the crowd and the soft strumming of an instrument that someone, whether it be the band or the contestant, is playing. He tries to gather the pieces of himself and hone in on the moment he’s supposed to be residing, but his brain is too far away and his hands can’t reach.

Shakira’s already turned, Usher, three chair turns and the crowd is rabid and thirsty for blood. Adam can’t be bothered to put himself back into his skin and muscles and bones. The song is over now and his chair turns itself automatically. He claps hard enough that his hands sting and he is grateful for any sort of sensation in his numbed body.

Three short speeches, eyes on him now, he spews out lines rehearsed then lets the attention drift away from him and back to someone less hollowed out.

He tells himself Don’t let this get to you. You are here and you cannot afford to be somewhere else. Don’t let this get to you. But he glances left anyway, and he knows. He knows and god it hurts and he wants to curl up into warmth and let himself die there. You are something I want to reach out and touch. You are my buoy in this restless ocean. I am too tired to swim.

***

Sometimes it’s so easy, forgetting. To sink into the noises and lights and let all of it wrap itself around him. Sometimes in between he will close his eyes and dull it down to a hum and feel the rising and falling of his own chest, remind himself that he is here and he is breathing.

There comes a point when it has to end and it has ended. Announcements are made over loud speakers and crowds shuffle out, still hungry for more, but whether the more that their bellies ache for is rejection or otherwise, he does not know.

For months he has struggled through this haze that looms over his head and drenches him. He tries to dig out of it, claws at the sides of the wall until his fingers bleed but he knows with a horrible, anchoring sense that he is trapped here.

Can it get worse?

It takes an innumerable amount of time for the set to clear. Adam drifts around through warehouse rooms, large and concrete and cold, hidden from cameras and the eyes and the teeth of the audience. Stray beings move through these rooms like mice and ghosts, carrying metal and plastic and cloth, they are the backbone and the truth. When Adam really thinks about it, he is actually a prop, a body tied up on strings. They give him too much coffee and too many pills and force feed him words that are heavy and acidic on his tongue.

Carson is the first one to run into him and he asks quick, unimportant questions, and then one slightly more important one.

“Are you okay?”

How do you say, _I loved him and it was virtuous_ without giving away too much?

“Yeah, man, I’m good.”

***

_your skin tasted like something else and i wanted to take all of you into my mouth and swallow and swallow and let you take over my body and i dont want to be myself anymore and i dont want to be something that isnt what you loved_

***

Eventually Adam made it back to his trailer and made himself turn the lights on and sit underneath the florescence and cook. He imagines that everyone has started to leave and maybe he should go home, but to what? He doesn’t want to go home to an empty apartment and an empty bed whose sheets don’t smell like anything.

He struggles with himself about drinking because he doesn’t necessarily enjoy drinking alone, but does anyone drink alone because they enjoy it? He knows that drinking could lead to multiple tiny, self-inflicted disasters, the most plausible of those ending with tears and broken glass biting into his knuckles, the least plausible but not entirely impossible ending with an unblinking stare into blackness.

Neither are entirely pleasant to imagine. 

He looks for his keys but goddamn the place is a mess, he’s not even sure which car he drove and after ten minutes of mindless, unavailing search he settles down on the couch in his room which has done nothing for him in the past three years but to serve as an ugly venus fly trap that swallows his–

He stands and pulls out the cushions.

***

“Levine!”

I can see you floating there, a monastery planted in a godless land, I am trying so hard to reach you.

“LEVINE!”

The current grabs hold of me and I am drowning.

“Shit, why’ya walking so fast? Wait up!”

My legs are useless as I try to keep my head above black water, she wraps her sharp fingers around my ankles and they are cold, she pulls me deeper until I cannot see the sunlight.

“Adam?”

***

Blake gets to Adam’s car as he’s starting the engine. He knocks on the window with one knuckle and the lines between his brow are valleys that Adam wants to trace with the tip of his tongue.

Blake’s “dude” is muffled through tinted glass, and for several seconds Adam considers reversing and speeding out of the garage and smashing himself into a pole at ninety miles an hour.

He presses the window down with shaking fingers, his tongue is swollen and filling the entirety of his mouth like a deep swallow of seawater.

Someone somewhere has the map of Adam’s mind. Someone somewhere is holding it hostage. Adam wants to find the map so that maybe he can navigate the hollow trespasses of himself. At any time of the day his brain is a disaster zone, a constant stream of information passing through like bullets. There are certain images that he catches and strings up like prisoners of war, and he manages, in this moment, to capture a few that might be either very valuable or very dangerous to be gripping with dirty hands in the future.

(Blake’s hairline is glistening with sweat underneath these terrible, buzzing garage lights)

(His breath smells strong and wafts over Adam’s face and Adam wonders with a loud ache in his gut if his tongue tastes like that smell)

(Wide eyes bore into the contours and angles of Adam’s face as if asking without asking. _Tell me how to reach you_ )

Adam is incapable of talking, sure that if he opens his mouth he will flood the world with this horrible saltwater he is full of. Blake has one giant hand curving over the open car window. “Just let me come over.” The lights buzz loudly overhead, gossiping with each other. “Let me fix this.”

There are things in this world that we will break and we will try to fix with our hands and our mouths and our blood but our hearts are not puzzles to be taken apart and put back together the same, they are wet sand molded into a shape that are washed away by the tide, vomited back onto someone else’s shoreline, remolded by someone else’s hands into a different shape, never holding the same amount of sand as they did before.

He rolls up the window and opens the passenger side door.

***

There is something deafening about the voice of the one that we love.

There is something about it that seeps into your bones, and your bones sponge it up like a dying man and bubbles of oxygen that he is trying to suck back into his lungs.

He does not know why he did this and he won’t question himself about it. If he asks himself anymore questions he is absolutely positive that his body and brain and soul will combust and never have existed, and all of this pain that he has suffered through will have been for nothing, and Blake will not remember him.

He drives eight miles over the speed limit, the lights of this city are too bright and too loud as they have always been and always will be, a comfort he finds most nights when he can find comfort in nothing else.

Adam feels that the putrid soul inhabiting his body is a parasite desperately trying to be a human being.

Tell me that I have scarred you the way you scarred me. Tell me that everything you want is sitting next to you the way everything I want is sitting next to me. Tell me anything and everything. Tell me that you have felt the ocean and the sand splashing underneath your skin and tell me you know that I put it there.

***

Adam’s house is strange and alien-like in the dark, as if it’s got a mask on until he flips the light switch. As if there is something hiding in the corners of the rooms waiting for him to come home. He has never been afraid of the dark but he is afraid of being alone in it.

“I don’t have any, um. Actual food or anything here, but we can order something if you want.”

He has absolutely no idea why these are the words he chooses to let tumble out of his mouth, but there they are, floating in this weird, uncomfortable air that sits between them, as if they’re strangers.

As if Adam doesn’t have the outline of Blake’s shoulder burned into his eyelids. As if he doesn’t have the texture of Blake’s inner thighs branded onto his tongue.

Blake says nothing at all. He stands and looks at Adam and his throat bobs up and down as he tries to swallow, and Adam wonders if he has the same taste in his mouth that Adam does: saltwater.

“I keep thinkin’ that sorry is gonna fix anything, but I know I’m wrong and you know I’m wrong, and I’ve got no fucking clue what it is I’m supposed to be sayin’ right now. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“So, what.”

Adam shifts his weight from one leg to the other. “You’re the one who said you wanted me to bring you here. I brought you here.”

When Blake runs his hands through his hair, it’s obvious to the both of them, it’s obvious to the creatures in Adam’s house, it’s obvious to the whole fucked-up world that what they had is a broken bottle, and that the both of them are just trying to lick the glass out of their wounds.

***

“We can’t fix it,” Adam’s mouth is close enough to Blake’s throat that he could lick a long and damning stripe up it. Blake’s hands ghost over Adam’s hips, never touching but the heat of his palms push through Adam’s clothes anyway, “I want you bad enough.”

They are separate and they are together, a tide pulling the sand from the shore and swallowing it, spitting it out, swallowing again. They do not touch each other but they breathe each other’s air. I want you bad enough.

They will never fix this. They will push each other into the sand and they will lick and writhe and sweat, they will drown in their disgust and they will savor it. The night will hold their secrets and their whimpers and the day will break over the horizon and the tide will come and sweep them away and tear them apart and toss them far from each other. I want you bad enough.

They will survive on stolen glances as if it were a drop of fresh water in this endless temptation that holds the lure of something that could save you but will kill you once you taste it. They will bite their lips until they can taste blood in their mouths and they will scream inside-out and drown trying to reach the safety that they can see but never touch. I want you bad enough.

Love is an ocean and we are drowning in it.

***

It is too early when Adam wakes up. He has his face pressed into Blake’s side and Blake is still asleep, his back rising and falling, a deep, methodic inhale and exhale slipping through him. Adam's chest aches almost immediately.

He doesn’t want to plaster on a face, he doesn’t want to sit through another half-cycle in a hollowed-out warehouse, he doesn’t want to throw sideways glances to his left and feel the brine bubble up in his throat. He presses his forehead closer into Blake’s ribs, wishes he could press hard enough that maybe he could mold himself against Blake’s skin so that he is formed around him. A growth you can’t remove. “Don’t go away from me.”

He feels like he whispers this but maybe Blake was already awake. Blake’s head turns on the pillow and he has one eye open, he squints at Adam. “Hm?”

He wants it to be like this always. He wants to feel the warm sun of Blake’s skin against his mouth in the morning, wants to run his hands all over Blake’s back and let that warmth soak through his own flesh and dry up the dampness of his own inside.

“I said, Don’t go away from me.”

But she is cold and unforgiving to your sins, and she will snatch him away from you as easily as she has thrown him back.

***

He tells himself Don’t let it get to you. Don’t let it get to you.

But in the end you will look to your left and he will be looking back at you, and your heart will ache with all of the love you have for him and can never give.

You want to tell him everything. You want to give him everything. He is the ocean and the buoy and everything. You can’t swim but you float on your back and stare up at the sky and feel the sun burning you. You will remember the sand that digs itself into the crevices of your body and you will remember how he made you feel whole and human. You want to tell him, I want you bad enough.

He knows.


End file.
